Plenty of waste to cut in state government

During times of austerity, sensible families and businesses cut waste. Governments should, too.

For California, a good place to start is State Auditor Grant Parks' new report, “Investigations of Improper Activities by State Agencies and Employees.” It “details seven substantiated allegations involving several state agencies” uncovering “wasteful decisions, poor contract oversight, unreported leave resulting in overpayments, misuse of state resources, and attendance abuse.”

The total comes to $280,000, just a fraction of the $233 billion in Gov. Gavin Newsom's May Revision to his budget proposal for fiscal year 2023-24, which begins on July

1. But the point of an audit like this is to discover patterns of waste, fraud and abuse.

Four examples from the report:

• An anonymous analyst at one agency, not named to prevent a violation of the government privacy code, was kept “on Administrative Time Off for approximately 20 months,” even though capable of working. That cost taxpayers $114,000.

• A psychiatric technician at the Department of State Hospitals was absent “without account” for 400 hours from 2018-21. That cost taxpayers about $12,500.

• A supervising registered nurse at the California Correctional Health Care Services had absences totaling 600 hours. That cost taxpayers $38,000.

• A supervisor at the Department of Parks and Recreation stored his private boat at a public boat dock for more than six years. That cost $36,000 in revenue that could've been raised by making that dock available to the public.

Again, these are relatively small dollar amounts compared to the state budget, but they reflect some of the ways public funds can easily be lost to outright waste.

For a broader look at the need for reform, Adrian Moore, vice president of policy at the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, pointed to the California Performance Review. Under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in 2004 its 275 analysts and state and local officials included both Republicans and Democrats, as well as members of business and even organized labor. Its 2,500 pages penciled out $32 billion in savings. Unfortunately, its sensible reforms soon were forgotten by him and the Legislature.

Little happened on that and other proposed reforms, Moore said, “because no one in the power structure cares. Governors never discipline agency directors over this stuff. The Legislature holds virtually no oversight hearings and doesn't take these things into account when doing budgets. So waste never has consequences.”

He said the CPR recommendations, in particular, included structural changes “to create accountability for performance.” That's key. The CPR wanted specific goals to be set for improvement, such as requiring a program to cut poverty a certain amount, or the program would be replaced with something better.

At this point, ideally audits of state and local governments would be vastly expanded. That actually was a proposal last year by Lanhee Chen, the Republican candidate for state controller. Although he got the most votes of any GOP statewide candidate, he still lost to Democrat Malia Cohen. It's still a good idea she should take up.

The budget deficit crisis, the LAO reported May 23, now is projected to last through 2026-27. So austerity is needed for the long term. The governor through his control of state departments and the Legislature through crafting a budget need to cut, cut, cut.